Salient Extension

Salient Extension : Rethinking Dubai's live/work.

Curious by nature, the human compulsion for exploration and discovery is stymied by contemporary urbanity characterized by a globalized sameness. The over inscription of behavioral and spatial codes structure repetitive and largely unconscious routines.

Dubai exemplifies the contemporary global city in which rapid growth and normative spectacle blurs distinctions specific to a place by minimizing geographic, cultural, and social character. Air conditioned homogeneity allows for hasty movement and minimal engagement. However, Dubai is surrounded by an immense desert landscape uninhibited by inscribed codes. Newcomers to the desert find their sense of propriety unsuited for a place without preexisting paths, relying on curiosity to discover new modes of occupation.

“Salient Extension” proposes an alternative to the expanding urban form by leveraging this sense of curiosity and discovery to encourage new, non-normative spatial structures that support creative production and direct engagement with the material ecology native to the site.

The project, an art and design creative campus for the Sharjah Art Foundation, is assembled through an additive-subtractive quarrying process that foregrounds and celebrates the local stone native to the context. The products of extraction and leftovers are re-purposed within the project at different scales in response to specific programmatic and structural functions.